On a road to nowhere

Slowly but surely, a four-lane highway is beginning to take shape on the sparsely populated Central Asian steppe. Soviet-era cars, trucks and ageing long-distance buses weave past modern yellow bulldozers, cranes and towering construction drills, labouring under Chinese supervision to build a road that could one day stretch from eastern Asia to Western Europe.

This small stretch of blacktop, running past potato fields, bare duncoloured rolling hills and fields of grazing cattle, is a symbol of China’s march westward, an advance into Central Asia that is steadily wresting the region from Russia’s embrace.

Here the oil and gas pipelines, as well as the main roads and the railway lines, always pointed north to the heart of the old Soviet Union. Today, those links are beginning to point toward China.

“This used to be Russia’s back yard,” said Raffaello Pantucci, director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London, “but it is increasingly coming into China’s thrall.” It is a shift that has shaken up the Russian leadership, which is watching China’s advance across the steppe with apprehension. Moscow and Beijing may speak the language of partnership these days, but Central Asia has emerged as a source of wariness and mistrust.

For China, the region offers rich natural resources, but Beijing’s grander commercial plans — to export its industrial overcapacity and find new markets for its goods — will struggle to find wings in these poor and sparsely populated lands.

In September 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping chose Kazakhstan’s sparkling, modern new capital, Astana, to announce what has since become a cornerstone of his new, assertive foreign policy, a Silk Road Economic Belt that would revive ancient trading routes to bring new prosperity to a long-neglected but strategically important region at the heart of the Eurasian continent.

Bound together by 2000 years of exchanges dating to the Western Han Dynasty and sharing a 1800km border, the two nations, Xi said, now have a “golden opportunity” to develop their economies and deepen their friendship.

At the China-Kazakhstan border, at a place known as Horgos to the Chinese and Khorgos to the Kazakhs, a massive concrete immigration and customs building is being completed to mark that friendship.

A short distance away, China is building an almost entirely new city, apartment block by apartment block, alongside a 5sq km free-trade zone, where traders sit in new multi-storey shopping malls hawking such items as iPhones and fur coats.

This is reputed to have been a seventh century stop for Silk Road merchants. Today, the People’s Daily newspaper calls it “the pearl” on the Silk Road Economic Belt.

But this pearl is distinctly lopsided: On the Kazakh side of the zone, opposite all those gleaming malls, a single small building, in the shape of a nomad’s tent or yurt, sits on an expanse of wasteland where a trickle of people stop to buy biscuits, vodka and camel’s milk.

The Silk Road slogan may be new, but many of its goals are not. Beijing has long been working to secure a share of the region’s rich natural resources to fuel China’s industrial